Archive for July, 2008
July 25, 2008 at 2:43 pm · Filed under Broken on IE7, Frustrations, ie6, ie7
Today we ran into a very fun error and by fun I mean stupid on the part of IE and probably because we had some fun trying to make it work. As it turns out, IE doesn’t like it when you use the lightbox script and the swfobject on the same page. I understand that this two scripts are not made to work together but the cool part is that they do work together without any problem on Firefox.
The problem is simple but it is quite annoying since it makes our website useless since IE decides to close the page giving the following error: “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://<Web site>.com. Operation aborted.” Their excuse is simple: “This problem occurs because a child container HTML element contains script code that tries to modify the parent container element of the child container. The script code tries to modify the parent container element by using either the innerHTML method or the appendChild method.” and they give a simple workaround that involves placing the script on a closed div or something of that sort which we tried with no luck.
What we ended up doing was implementing a mootools domready type function for prototype to initialize both the lightbox and the swfobject once the DOM is fully loaded. Of course this fixed the problem but, when we tested on IE7, the lightbox overlay doesn’t cover the whole screen (I think this bug is unrelated to our issue but it is still an annoying bug that happens only in IE7). So, we decided to take the overlay out so the image now appears floating in the middle of the website with no backdrop.
As we usually say here on Stupid IE: Thanks IE for making our lives a little better.
July 22, 2008 at 10:02 am · Filed under General, ie6
“The best way to get rid of IE6 is to stop supporting it.” some may argue this is a bad move as our responsibility as Web Developers is to support our users and create a nice user experience when navigating through our websites. I completely agree with this statement but I can’t agree to keep supporting a browser that has no respect whatsoever to my work and makes me waste countless hours trying to get things to work correctly on it.
My plan: Every new client that I get is being upgraded to IE7 or FireFox, depending on their usage and thanks to some Racists Websites that don’t work on any other browser except IE.
July 18, 2008 at 9:44 am · Filed under Frustrations, Other Microsoft Nightmares
Thanks to Wacky Archives for compiling this list of the 25 worse Windows Fail. Maybe we should start relaying more on Mac or Linux to develop kiosks and displays. I don’t know, just a thought.
http://www.wackyarchives.com/featured/25-worst-moments-when-windows-fail.html
July 15, 2008 at 5:40 pm · Filed under General
For those of us who decided to dump the PC but are still forced to keep one handy to test our designs, he’s a great tool that will allow you to test without having to set a Virtual Machine, Boot Camp, or any other method on your mac but instead let’s you run a simple program:
http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/
Enjoy,… I guess.
July 14, 2008 at 3:11 pm · Filed under Broken on IE7, Broken on IE8, ie6, ie7, ie8
This post comes from a mix of two articles dealing with security while browsing the Web. In simple terms, if you are using IE on any version (5 - 
then the chances of your computer getting hacked with malware, exploits, viruses etc, are far greater than someone using a good browser like our favorite: Firefox.
The article explains us that: “The vulnerability poses a special danger since the ActiveX control is digitally signed by Microsoft, which means that people who have Internet Explorer configured to trust ActiveX controls with that designation would run it automatically if encountered on a Web page.
Some of the Web pages that have already been hacked with automated SQL injection attacks earlier this year are also hosting the Microsoft Access attack, according to Symantec’s Sean Hittel.”
And yes, it is Symantec who is explaining the problem and yes, July patches are out so IE users will have to wait or disable their ActiveX control in order to be safer.
July 12, 2008 at 4:20 pm · Filed under Broken on IE8
And this time we are not the ones to point it out. It is Microsoft who does the favor: http://www.thoughtmechanics.com/2008/07/12/ie8-fail-win/
July 10, 2008 at 5:01 pm · Filed under ie7
July 10, 2008 at 3:46 pm · Filed under Broken on IE7, General
Haven’t tried this myself, is not very easy now that I’ve completely crossover Mac and I only use IE to test Websites about once every week, but it seems that IE is a memory thief.
Has anybody experienced a similar issue? We may need to keep an eye about this on the upcoming IE8 since it seems to be a recent behavior probably caused by a patch?
July 9, 2008 at 8:39 am · Filed under Broken on IE7, Frustrations
I know iframes are not that great because of accessibility issues etc but they are a great solution when clients want to white label applications or information from other Websites which in case is what I had to do on this occasion and what triggered this post.
To make a long story short, I have a client that wanted to offer the reservation system I created for them to other websites who in turn didn’t want to have clients go away from their own websites or see my client’s logo and contact information. My client’s system was tied in with their internal Database and server and for security everything needed to be ran on their servers without any external connections so the easiest way was to create a stripped down version of the reservation process, in other words just the forms, which could be placed on an iframe.
Everything worked perfectly on Firefox of course but when we go to IE, we get an error because the sessions are not set correctly so the whole system fails.
So here I am, once again trying to figure out a workaround to have something as simple as a form, that uses PHP sessions set on an iframe, work on IE the way it flawlessly work on Firefox. Seriously people, we should sue Microsoft for damages in all the time and effort wasted getting our websites to work on their crappy monopolized browsers.
* Update
Apparently by adding this: header(’P3P: CP=”CAO PSA OUR”‘); to the page involved in setting the sessions will make IE work correctly. Just thought I add this for everybody that’s having the same problem,
July 2, 2008 at 3:11 pm · Filed under General
Microsoft unveiled today their plans to include anti-malware protection on their IE8 browser.
This should sound like good news but when you give it a little bit more thought, things are not as pleasing. Let’s begin with that the appearance of such a vast array of malware is probably Micorosft’s fault since they have always developed software with incredible security holes and then take enormous amount of time to create patches to fix them.
But as you keep reading this article courtesy of Cnet, you realize that all they are doing is adding more warnings when you try to do stuff. This means that I will have to click twice, three times or even more just to get the computer to download something or to perform an action I want it to do just as they have been doing with Vista.
Seriously Microsoft, coming up with a Security measure that mainly focus on the user clicking on a yes button is pretty lame. You should see my Dad around those boxes: he just clicks away without reading or understanding what he’s reading. Amazing security feature.
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